Please join us on Twitter on June 4th from 6 – 7 pm Pacific for a live #HealthyHousing / #GreenBuilding chat on Twitter with renown environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr and friends. More details to be announced shortly.

Many of our friends in the world of #GreenBuilding and #HealthyHomes are new to the world of Twitter parties and the potential impact they have in generating awareness of a cause or product or agency—so here’s our best quick explanation and some links from others as a place for you to start…

A Twitter party is a real-time event that happens on the Twitter social media platform. You need a Twitter handle / account in order to participate. All Twitter communications (short texts called”tweets“) are limited to 140 characters. In order to be considered a participant in the event, you need to tweet on the date and during the noted time frame for the event [this event is June 4, 2015 from 6 to 7 pm, Pacific], and you need to have each tweet you post include the hashtag (an identifying metadata tag preceded by the # symbol) for the event. Our hashtag is #AskEdB (the number sign is part of what you need to write.) You can then follow the Twitter Party using one of the methods below:

•a platform that creates a grid on your screen and shows you everything with the party’s hashtag (and/or everything tweeted to or by the party’s host(s)). For this Twitter party we recommend you include @LeadSafeAmerica, @EdBegleyJr and #AskEdB in your grid for the party.

•or you can also participate without a grid—by doing periodic searches for the event hashtag—but it makes it a little trickier to follow.

Twitter parties are a great way to engage a lot of people in a conversation about a cause (or a product or a company) in a very short time period. In our case, this is a cause-based initiative as an effort to drive awareness to #GreenBuilding, #GreenLiving, #Sustainability and #HealthyHousing – all key elements towards #LeadPoisoningPrevention (which is why it is being hosted by the Lead Safe America Foundation.)

One way to gauge success of a Twitter party is by measuring (using web-based reporting tools) the number of “impressions” created by the Twitter party; this is the number of people who will likely see the posts either during the Twitter party or later given searches for the hashtag. It is a quantification of the reach of the hashtag. Our goal with this first #AskEdB Twitter party is to generate between 15,000,000 and 20,000,000 impressions, and to follow this event with future monthly #AskEdB Twitter parties using the same hashtag, increasing the number of impressions each time.

The opportunity created for the guests (or followers) of the Twitter party is that they will – with the guidance of the host(s) and panelists – be able to ask experts (or celebrities) questions, and get answers in real time! While all questions are welcome, questions will be more likely to be answered directly by the host(s) if they are on-topic for the party. [In this case #HealthyHousing, #GreenBuilding, #EnvironmentalToxicity and #Sustainability.]

To help facilitate the party – both to give a broader base for potential answers and to increase the relevant knowledge available to followers around the subject of the Twitter party, a team of panelists is often assembled for the event [geographically, they may be scattered across continents (as any participant), yet – magically – accessible to all “in attendance” at the party in real-time on the Internet from their individual homes, offices, studios or hotels.] In our case, some of the top green/environmental/healthy housing bloggers have volunteered to be panelists for this event.